Packer entered the national literary scene with a high-profile appearance in the Debut Fiction issue of The New Yorker (2000). That story became the title story in her collection “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” which earned “the highest of accolades from the New York Times, Harper’s and the New Yorker. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her stories have twice appeared in Best American Short Stories and she is the editor of “New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best,” 2008.

In 2005, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. In Spring 2007 she was named one of American’s Best Young Novelists by Granta as well as one of Smithsonian Magazine’s Young Innovators in October 2007. In June 2010, Packer was selected as one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” luminary fiction writers.

She is currently working on a novel set in the aftermath of the Civil War about the Buffalo Soldiers (black soldiers who left the South and traveled to the West).

Regis University is one of 28 Jesuit Catholic universities in the nation that prepares leaders to live productive lives of faith, meaning and service. Regis, a Denver institution since 1877, has campuses in Northwest Denver, Thornton, Colorado Springs and at the Denver Tech Center, and online.